


The Work of Feeding Humans

by Miss_M



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Baking, F/M, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-22 07:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17055884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: A vampiric baker’s assistant. Yeah. Sure. Fine. Why the spartan hell not?





	The Work of Feeding Humans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jillyfae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jillyfae/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Winter meant longer nights, which theoretically meant that Con could stay out of doors longer and we could spend more time together. In practice, because he had made clear more than once that he _wanted_ to spend time with me, and I was a complete blanker and couldn’t say no to him if my life depended on it (har-dee-friggin’-har), I was constantly underslept and starting to find dragging myself to the bakery every morning a real chore. My snappishness eventually reached such epic levels, Charlie got annoyed enough that he told me to sort myself out, which resulted in my pitching a fit at Con when he came to collect me for an outing. And then, well. Let’s just say I didn’t expect to see Con again, after the things I said to him that night.

Imagine my surprise when I fired up the ovens the next morning and unwrapped my layers of scarves and coat, thankful that at least I’d have a couple of hours to myself and so maybe not having slept the night through again, Con or no Con, wouldn’t matter so much, when the wards around the door leading from the bakery to the back garden chimed all together to let me know an intruder lurked outside.

I opened the door, expecting nothing more challenging than a garden-wall scaling derelict, only to find Con standing outside, looking as hale and hearty as he ever did (which is to say, not much).

“May I come in?” he asked politely.

“What are you doing here?” I asked stupidly. 

“The sun does not rise till after seven this time of year. Since you made clear that you are not your best on little sleep, I thought it would perhaps not be disagreeable to you if I kept you company for a few hours while you made… cinnamon rolls.”

I blinked. He could have been off, gallivanting who knows where and doing who knows what (even after everything that had happened, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know too much about a vampire’s hobbies), and instead he was offering to sit in the volcano-hot bakery with me and keep me company while I worked. 

I almost balked: mornings in the bakery were _my_ skegging time, they were my favorite part of the day, and I didn’t want to share them. Yeah, this whole “being really good friends with a vampire” thing was still a work in progress, and it tended to bring out the bitchy baby in me.

“Say _can’t_ ,” I said, while he still waited outside in the frigid air, wearing, I couldn’t help noticing, no more layers than he usually did. 

He did not blink at me, nor open his mouth in confusion. Of course not. He did indulge in a longer than usual pause.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You never use contractions, have you ever noticed that? It’s always ‘you are not your best’ and ‘we will not be defeated’ and ‘vampires should not get suntans.’ Say ‘I can’t wait to come in and help you bake, Sunshine.’ If you don’t say it, my wards won’t let you come inside.”

“Your wards would not keep me out, but if it pleases you…” 

He made a noise, which I recognized almost at once as he clearing his throat and managed to bite back the instinctive scream the sound aroused in me. 

“I can’t wait to come in and help you bake, Sunshine,” Con said solemnly, and I stepped aside and let him into the inner sanctum.

It didn’t occur to me till he was inside to worry about the heat from the ovens harming him, but then I remembered him sitting by a roaring fireplace in his, let’s call it for the sake of convenience, home. _I enjoy it. It is the warmth of life and the heat of death._ Well he’d definitely get warm in my bakery, though the only death which threatened any of us in there came from an excess of sugar and marshmallows. 

And so a routine was hatched unto the world: Con would turn up most very early mornings, sit on the stool by the door till it started to get light, then drop a kiss on my flour-dusted hair and vanish. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we didn’t. Just me and my vampire buddy, jiving in the bakery. It was working out quite nicely till the morning I had the ingredients for a batch of cinnamon rolls assembled on the counter, and Con asked me to let him prepare the batter and glazing. 

“I have watched you closely while you work,” he said. “Perhaps they would not be up to the standard your customers have come to expect, but I am curious whether mine would be… edible, or it is the power you draw from the sun which makes your pastries so desirable to humans.” 

_That_ hadn’t even occurred to me, that my baking skills might have had something to do with the way sunlight seemed to power me like a human battery. Something to think about when I had a moment to myself. 

I fought down the urge to throw him out of my bakery for daring to try to usurp me. Swallowing loudly enough that he could have heard me even without a vampire’s acute hearing, I stepped back from the counter and gestured at the flour, the sugar, the jar of cinnamon sticks. 

Con did that thing vampires do, which never failed to go straight to the most primitive, surviving-predators part of my brain: he moved too fast for me to see, and before you could say “zombies and ghouls may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” he had a batch of cinnamon rolls all ready for the oven. 

I said nothing while they baked and I prepared a pan of Bitter Chocolate Death and a batch of caramel pretzels and some Honey Traps. Con shared my silence and diplomatically did not offer to make the other cakes for me as well.

I should have known this was a bad idea: Con’s cinnamon rolls tasted terrible. Not an-apprentice-made-these terrible, just… wrong. All wrong, like everything about a vampire sitting in my bakery looking almost hopeful while he watched me chew and swallow, was wrong. 

I tried to be gentle, really I did, but lying about other people’s baking was never in my skillset. 

“Merciful mother Kali!”

“Is something amiss?” Con asked.

“Amiss?” I poured myself a glass of water to wash down the taste. “Bloody hell, they’re revolting!”

He somehow went even more still than usual. Oh dear, I’d just insulted a vampire’s culinary pride. Guess we were about to find out _exactly_ how much he liked me.

The answer was, he liked me enough not to rip my head off or even say anything nasty to me. He said nothing, in fact, before he left, while I stood contemplating whether it was safe to dump his experiment in the trash or I should ask Yolande to place some wards on it first. If the global council got its hands on them, I was pretty sure it could weaponize Con’s cinnamon rolls easy as anything. 

Big surprise, after my stunning display of tact Con made himself scarce the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after _that_. With the run-up to the Winter Solstice, I was too busy to miss him (lying about my feelings _was_ in my skillset), and I refused to feel bad for hurting his pride (you could say I was flash brilliant at lying about my feelings, in fact). My state of busy denial lasted until the day I emerged from the sanctuary my bakery provided for long enough to make the connection between the even-greater-than-usual demand for baked goods and the increased presence of out-of-towners in Old Town. I even snagged a newspaper and read the council announcements in order to confirm the rumors I’d heard from Charlie and Kyoko. 

That night, I bundled up and opened my balcony door to the freezing night. “Con, will you please come back? I need you.”

He turned up at the bakery the following morning. Let it never be said he would keep a lady, or even me, waiting (har-dee-har-har). He kept his distance and said little, which gave me a chance to explain that I needed his help if I was going to survive the next couple of weeks. 

He said nothing at first. Suitably chastened and full of tender care for his feelings (yeah, I was all cut up over a vampire’s feelings, and I suspected that _that_ would never stop feeling weird, even to me), I hastened to add:

“I am not commanding you, Con. I am asking. For your help. As my friend.” 

Just saying that and knowing that every word was true made me want to laugh or throw things. Or laugh while throwing things. 

At last Con spared me further existential angst: “You want me to help you bake.”

“I want you to knead and mix the dough while I hold on to you, in between me measuring out the ingredients and the ovens doing the rest. I figure if I could protect you from the sun through physical contact, I should be able to channel my baking mojo through you as well.”

There was another vintage Con pause. “Why?”

“Because I’m desperate! Paulie, my assistant, is spending the entire month with his family in Raindance, I don’t have time to train a replacement in the middle of the Winter Solstice rush, and the local tourist board’s latest brilliant scheme is bringing unusually many hungry tourists to Old Town. I can’t keep up with demand on my own, and Charlie’s reputation is on the line. We’re getting slaughtered!”

He didn’t move or change expression. Still I instinctively raised my hands, palms out, a pathetic bone-and-skin protective barrier between us. 

“Bad choice of word. Seriously, Con, I need you. I can’t do this any other way, short of using an industrial mixer, and some lines just can’t be crossed. _Please_.” I didn’t need to fake the sincerity of my plea, believe me. 

Con looked at me. 

He looked at the ovens, the countertops, the shelves of baking supplies. 

“Yes,” he said at last. “Your plan seems sound. I will help you, Sunshine, so you may sheer now.”

I blinked. Then I reached behind me, felt for the edge of a countertop, and leaned against it. My Con, my vampire whatever-the-hell-he-was-to-me, using slang? Making jokes? Next thing you knew, he’d be serving customers during the late shift and trading Other gossip with Mrs. Bialosky.

“Who are you and what have you done with Con?” I demanded dramatically. 

He respected my delicate human sensibilities and didn’t smile, at least not so his teeth showed. He did look pretty damn eager to try his hand at baking again. 

The thought of an eager vampire still made me want to climb out through the window and not stop running till I’d reached the ocean, at the same time as it made me wonder what other activities might bring out the eagerness in him. I doubted that push-pull of curiosity and terror would ever entirely stop. I wasn’t even sure I wanted it to stop. 

I pushed back from the counter and clapped my hands more decisively than I felt. “Right, there will be a horde of hungry customers trooping up to the counter in less than three hours.” I pointed at a row of mixing bowls I’d set up in the hope that he would respond to my summons. “Start on the left and work your way down.”

“Yes.” 

He turned his back to me and took up the mixing spoon and the first bowl, then waited patiently for me to touch him. My meek little vampire. 

Suppressing a giggle – or was that hysteria? – I came up behind him and placed my hand on the back of his neck, above his shirt collar. The thought of holding on to his arm and feeling his muscles move while he mixed batter at lightning speed had a certain appeal, but I didn’t want to risk him accidentally smashing me into a wall, if his movements got too nomad for me. 

The skin on Con’s neck was cool against my palm. I could feel the column of his spine and the tendons running alongside it, and his hair brushed my fingers. He held absolutely still under my touch.

“Go,” I said, and off we merrily went.


End file.
